


Between Power, Between Wisdom

by selahexanimo



Category: Legend of Zelda
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-08
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-11-20 15:53:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/587075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selahexanimo/pseuds/selahexanimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Zelda and Ganondorf, in victory and defeat, in youth and old age. Fate has chained them together, and not even death can part them. A series of Zelgan standalone drabbles and oneshots.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Before the Execution

Ganondorf wakes to Zelda’s slow caress along his scalp, the prickle of her lips along his jaw, long before he hears the howling voices outside.

He holds still. Icy air singes his lips. She works her shaking fingers through his hair, down to his neck. He exhales, slow and long.

"Please don't wake up,” she breathes.

“You should not have come,” he replies.

He looks at her, at her winter-bruised skin, her red eyes.

“I am sorry,” she says.

“You always are.” He turns away. 

He listens to the crowd roar for his blood. Zelda kisses his mouth, slow, long.


	2. dead women tell no tales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dead women tell no tales. Sad men write them down. (Lemony Snicket)

**I**

History belongs to the victor, Ganondorf Dragmire. Hyrule is your blank page, your empty book—and yet, you cannot bring yourself to rewrite it.

**II**

You write of your people. (Women with deserts seeping from their footsteps; women damned to thievery and blistering winds. Women who inherited nothing but a ruined temple and Din’s tearful regret—for they are her unlucky children—women who cannot hear the voices of their makers. The Gerudo are damned, and their enemies are blessed, but you, Ganondorf Dragmire, will rob the Hylians of their blessing. You, Dragmire, will spit in the faces of the gods and save your people.)

You write, briefly, of the Hylian king. (Nameless fool, who took your false obeisance for truth, who presumed to talk at you of his _pardon_ and call you his _vassal_ , as if you hungered for his mercy. His death was so swiftly accomplished that you barely remember how you did it.)

You write, briefly, of the hero. (A child. Always a child. Clever, tireless, branded with the Triforce of Courage as a sheep is branded. Goddess-damned boy, dying in your throne room, hand grasping for the Master Sword. He should have melted into the Lost Woods and become a Skullchild. Better that, than die a martyr.)

But your hand lingers when you write of the princess.

**III**

She is but a child when your paths first cross. You are kneeling before her father’s throne when you glimpse her in a window. You turn (see her grim face plastered to the glass, her eyes an almost colorless shade of blue). You smile.

You notice the boy in green beside her, then, recoiling from your gaze as Hylians do (as the king himself did, the moment you entered the Great Hall. The king gazed upon the size of you and stepped back; that single step said more than any word he has since spoken).

But the princess does not move. She regards you, as you regard her—and it is only after a handful of heartbeats that she turns away.

Your heart clenches. It is not fear that seizes you, not anger, but something else—something like pleasure. This girl—this _Hylian—_ has taken the measure of you. You had not expected to encounter someone so shrewd. The unexpected promise coils in your throat, the sweet, sudden thought that stealing the goddesses blessing will not be _easy_.

Gods know, if you hunger for anything, it is for a _challenge_.

**IV**

She is clever, in her Hylian way. There is no fear in her, only caution and a craft akin to cunning. She confides in no one but a Sheikah woman and the boy in green. The princess treats you as her father’s guest, with a blank-faced poise that would serve her well as queen—if she ever lives to become one.

You uncover her secrets: nightmares that the common folk call _prophecies_ and that her father mistrusts; a sense of frustration, of loneliness; her plan to seize the Triforce for herself. You ache to ask her why—does she imagine that her intentions are so pure that the gods would not break the Triforce to pieces in her hands?

(You are not so callow—you are utterly without purity; you will seize that you can take.)

You nearly speak to her of these matters. She is seated beside you at dinner, staring toward a troupe of performers, not watching them. Her colorless eyes are glazed, her expression shut down and weary. Her head is so close you could bend toward her and ruffle the fine threads of her hair with your breath.

You wonder what she would look like, if you whispered a warning into her ear. Wonder what she would look like, if you told her, “Zelda—you are not alone.”

But you do not speak.

Instead, you kill her father. Pursue her and her Sheikah from the castle and double back to find her boy in the Sacred Realm. You seize the Triforce. It shatters in your hands.

You smell the stench of Power scorching your flesh, and it is sweet.

**V**

Though she has brought nothing but ruin to her people, the princess is still damnably clever. You catch her seven years later, dressed as a boy—a lyre-player wrapped in Sheikah bandages. And even when you crush her magic with your Power and force her back into her woman’s body, you feel again the pleasure that prickled your spine the first time you saw her.

Stealing the goddesses’ blessing will not be easy. Zelda ensures it will not be so.

**VI**

Bu it does not last.

Nothing does.

**VII**

The hero is dead. You and Zelda face one another upon the topmost tower of your castle. The princess is her knees, blood dripping from her nose, her mouth. Her bow is broken, her arrows scattered. How hard she stares at you, as you approach with your sword drawn. You look into her bruised face and see her as a child—the princess watching you through a pane of glass, frail as a waif, eyes like a queen. She had not looked away, back then, when she was nothing but a clever child.

She does not look away now.

You tower over her. She considers you (trembling as she holds herself up, breath rasping and wet). You sink to your haunches, place your fingers upon her eyelids, and draw them shut—as if she is already dead.

“It will go easier,” you say.

(You tell yourself the ease of her death does not matter—not for her, anyway. But perhaps it will go easier for you—because on the edge of victory, a part of you cracks.

You are not entirely sure you want this victory.)

“I do not want your mercy,” she gasps.

You draw back your hand; her swollen eyes ooze open. They waver, glazed, and then she focuses. She stares at you, even when you set aside your blade and grasp her head. She stares at you with her queen’s eyes, steady and colorless and raw as winter.

“The gods are done with you,” you say. Speaking again not for her—but for yourself.

“No,” she says. She lifts a hand, clutches at your wrist. “Never.”

The word still shapes her lips when you twist her head and break her neck.

**VIII**

History belongs to the victor, Ganondorf Dragmire. Hyrule is your blank page. With a stroke of ink, you can erase the Hylians, their hero, their king.

You can erase their princess—their messiah.

But you can never quite bring yourself to write the princess from history.

Because to do so, you must start to erase yourself.


	3. Drink Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are more alike than she can bear.

Ganondorf taunts Zelda with mulled wine. She does not touch it, though a goblet accompanies her meal every day. The wine smells of her father’s murder. The King of Hyrule had barely swallowed when the poison had seized him. He had died face down in mulled wine, while Ganondorf had looked on.

(While _she_ had looked on and done nothing.)

Ganondorf himself visits her prison, after a fortnight, bearing goblets and a wine skin. He sits upon her bed and watches her watch him. “Drink,” he says, at last. “I have had enough of your petulance.”

"If you think this is petulance, then you are a stupider man than I have supposed," she snaps.

He snorts. “If you fear poison, it is little wonder you lost Hyrule so easily.”

She bristles. The kingdom was not hers to lose, not in name - it was her father’s.

(But he should not have lost it, not when she could have saved him.)

Ganondorf holds out the goblet. “I have better things to do than kill you,” he says. “Come. I want the company.”

"How dare you," she breathes. "How dare you speak to me as if we were allies—"

"Oh," he says. "But we are."

He unstoppers the wine skin, fills a goblet, and drinks. “You did not stop me,” he says, watching her with hooded, golden eyes. “But you could have. Or did the goddesses abandon you in the crucial moment?” A smile quirks his mouth. “They have been known to do so.”

The goddesses had not abandoned her. They had sent her dreams, so many that she had stopped sleeping for fear of them - for fear of the way she looked in those visions, motionless at the high table as her father frothed and convulsed, motionless not from terror, but from relief.

"One word," Ganondorf says, "and you could have saved him."

"My father," she replies, "was not a man to heed one word."

She thinks of how the world is filled with tyrants, some who know it, and some who do not. There was no confronting those who did not know what they were. And watching Ganondorf, she realizes the Gerudo understands this as well.

Ganondorf fills the empty goblet and holds it out to her. “It will be months before your hero arrives,” he says. “Petulance can neither give you company nor keep you warm.”

She takes the mulled wine after a long moment. The warm smell of cinnamon and nutmeg clouds her nostrils. “Do not think this makes us friends,” she says. “I will see you dead before the year is out.”

"Do you even need to say it, princess?" He empties the skin into his goblet, salutes her.

"I do not say it for you," she whispers. "I say it for myself."

As one, Hylian and Gerudo put their goblets to their lips and drink.


	4. Meet the Family

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda and Ganondorf meet each other's families. The noise of cultures crashing is loud enough to deafen.

He has a ridiculous number of blood relatives, and she has next to none at all.

They sit between their families at the head table - the Hylian princess with her mother and father at her right hand, the Gerudo prince with his mother, grandmother, grandaunt, and eldest sister at his left hand. The remainder of his relatives - a host of kinswomen beyond count - fill the tables below the salt. The princess has never before seen so many women in one place. And neither have any of the members of the Hylian court, judging from the way that they huddle, helpless, at the long benches.

The Hylians seem to flinch, en masse, from the polite smiles and restrained laughter of their Gerudo neighbors, and there are so many Hylian hands clutching at their finery, in an indiscreet attempt to safeguard things they should not have been flaunting at the dinner table anyway. So much Hylian terror, in fear of thieves and murder, right in the middle of the main course, when they, the princess thinks, are probably not any better.

"You think this is a great number?" the prince says, snorting, when she tells him of her the observations. "This is just the betrothal. There will be three times as many Gerudo present when we are wed."

"Where do they all come from?" she asks, playful, before her brain has quite caught up with her mouth. She blushes.

He glances, slyly, past her. “Where did all of yours go?” he retorts.

She winces. She is embarrassed by how insubstantial her own family looks beside his. Her mother the queen is as frail as glass in her chair, her smile wan and her eyes cold, her lashes fluttering as if she will soon require smelling salts. Her father is too big and too loud, swelling at the chest and roaring about the beef, boar, and excellent beer. His merriment swallows the room, as if he is trying to make up for being one Hylian among so many Gerudo.

"We are the kind of family," she begins, carefully, "that should not gather for any sort of occasion."

His eyes brighten. “Indeed?”

She grimaces. “Indeed.”

She considers telling him of the aftermath of her last family reunion - when her father rode out at the head of two hundred armed men to crush a rebellious uncle - but she forebears. His mother already thinks Hylians are crazy. It would be better not to give them further ammunition.

But the Gerudo prince will not be put off. “You must tell me more,” he said. “When, of course, we are not in such volatile company.”

Which means he has seen the not quite discrete glances of disgust his mother and grandmothers have been giving Zelda’s parents, and the entire Hylian assembly.

She touches his knee beneath the table. “Soon enough,” she says. “Though if you do not wish to marry me afterward, it may be too late.”

"Never fear, princess." He covers her hand with his own. "I think I shall enjoy the challenge."


	5. An Excellent Curriculum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zelda’s visit to Gerudo Valley ends up being more entertaining than either she or Ganondorf originally anticipated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally written for the Tournament of Arms 2013: Mightier Than Swordplay contest over at the Knights of Fandom tumblr. [Find it here](http://knightsoffandom.tumblr.com/post/45877698533/an-excellent-curriculum).

The Princess of Hyrule attends the coronation of Prince Ganondorf Dragmire. She arrives in the courtyard of Gerudo Fortress flanked by Hylian dignitaries and an escort dressed in ceremonial armor. At dinner, she sits silent with her hands folded and her back straight, as grim as her royal guard.  
  
Ganondorf attempts conversation, because his grandmothers would want him to be polite and his cousins will want him to tell them about the princess.

Princess Zelda has little to say. Ganondorf comments on the weather, already bored; Zelda takes a long moment to answer, as if the subject of the weather has never once crossed her mind.  
  
Somehow, their talk turns to scholarship. He mentions that he is studying certain ancient and obscure Gerudo poets, taking an interest in literature his grandmothers once had to force-feed him. She gives a little twitch, as if he has pinched her, and turns on him an expression of such raw fervor that he is taken aback.  
  
"Have you perhaps read them?" he asks. He cannot imagine a Hylian knowing of such things.  
  
"In the original," she says. But then she touches delicate fingers to her mouth, as if to recall her blurted words. She purses her lips and regards her trencher.  
  
"Indeed?" He raises his eyebrows.  
  
“Indeed.” She inclines her head without looking at him. She is finished talking. He suspects, however, that she still has things to say.  
  
But this is Hylian gentility: closemouthed, stiff. His grandmothers had warned him that Hylians were peculiar.  
  
"What did she say?" ask the cousins, later, when dinner is over and Ganondorf has retired to his rooms.  
  
He is overseeing the serving girls, who fold and pack away his ceremonial robes; the little cousins are bouncing off the walls, giggling and pleading for information, their hands sticky from the meal, their brains strung out with too much watered wine. There are a few older cousins too, still in their formal clothes, greedy to know about the princess.  
  
"Barely anything," says Ganondorf. "Hylians and conversation do not mix well."  
  
"But she’s so pretty," wails a tiny cousin. "She has pretty yellow hair."  
  
"And how does that matter?" says Ganondorf, though he does not entirely disagree with the sentiment.  
  
"She’s as sour as bad wine!" laughs one of the elder cousins. "Hylians and smiles do not go together, I am thinking."  
  
"Why does she have to stay here so long?" says a third cousin, pouting. "Send her sour Hylian face back where it came from."  
  
"As Din is good," says Ganondorf, exasperated, "do not be juvenile."  
  
But he thinks: a pity that he must indeed entertain an unsmiling, unspeaking Hylian princess for seven goddess-damned days. A week is indeed too long for her to be here. He should send her packing, like the third cousin says.  
  
But the third cousin is silly and melodramatic and of course he does not dignify her demand by paying it any further attention.  
  
The younger cousins have plans for the princess, anyway. He is shocked to discover this, barely a day later: he stumbles across the princess touring Gerudo Fortress, escorted by a single guard and two of his cousins. The cousins grasp her hands, gabbling about the hidden rooms, the blood-stained dungeon, and how the princess must not touch the pottery or _she_ will end up in the blood-stained dungeon. Princess Zelda meets Ganondorf’s eye, as they pass one another. He inclines his head and she returns the gesture, but not before he catches the glimmer of consternation in her face.  
  
When they meet at dinner, Princess Zelda begins, “Lord Dragmire, your cousins—”  
  
"I see they have taken to you." He opens his hands with a regretful gesture. "I will make sure they do not bother you for the remainder of your stay."  
  
She blinks. “No. They do not bother me. I meant, only, to say…” She pauses, purses her mouth. He watches her small lips, then looks, hastily, away. “They are good children,” Zelda finishes.  
  
"Well," says Ganondorf. "I am glad someone thinks they are good."  
  
oOo  
  
The cousins stalk the princess like hunters, day in and day out. The younger ones show off their horses, their bruises, and their trinkets until Ganondorf wants to throttle them. But the princess seems unperturbed. The older ones skulk and goggle, shying away from Princess Zelda’s smiles.  
  
Ganondorf takes her to the fortress library on the third day. He hears a bevy of his cousins giggling in the shadows.  
  
"Which of the poets have you read?" Ganondorf asks, when he catches Zelda ogling a tome. He ignores the girls’ stifled laughter, their soft chatter, from whatever niche in which they are hiding.  
  
She clasps her hands. “It is difficult to keep track,” she says. Her voice is low, so that he must lean forward to hear her, but he like the rich smoothness of it, the steely hint of command. “One reads so much. But I—”  
  
From the shadows, a cousin gives an exaggerated yowl of a yawn. A fit of giggling erupts.  
  
Ganondorf rolls his eyes skyward. But Princess Zelda is smiling, faintly, toward the direction of the outburst.  
  
"Come," she says. "Poetry is not so boring."  
  
There is a silence. And then:  
  
"It is," says a cousin.  
  
"Boring enough to kill you," pipes up another.  
  
Zelda opens her hands; Ganondorf notes this very Gerudo gesture with surprise. “But I am not dead,” she says.  
  
"I am," says a third cousin. Snorting laughter again.  
  
Zelda raises her eyebrows at Ganondorf. “What interesting children,” she mouths.  
  
"Obviously," he says, "you do not know them."  
  
She looks sideways at him, her eyes dark with humor.  
  
The cousins are brazen by the fourth day. Ganondorf does not see Zelda until supper. When she finally appears, she totters with a bowl-legged gait.  
  
"You are not yourself," he says, with some concern.  
  
"Your cousins," Zelda replies, sitting gingerly down, "are teaching me to spit, swear, steal, and ride bareback."  
  
"An excellent curriculum."  
  
The Princess of Hyrule looks surprised. And then she laughs.  
  
The cousins have positively ruined her by the evening of the sixth day. Ganondorf, returning to his rooms, notices the door to her chamber is open. He glances toward it, as he strides by, then pauses at the sight within.  
  
Zelda stands illuminated in the weak brazier light, swimming in chestnut robes with Gerudo embroidery upon the hem. She is fighting her way free of the robes, looking as if she is peeling free of some great, molten monster. She stiffens, when he darkens the doorway; her head snaps up, and when she sees him, she pulls the robes back over her shoulders. She is wearing a nightgown, Ganondorf notes, with great interest.  
  
"The girls are playing a game," she says. "I should not have encouraged them."  
  
"What sort of game," Ganondorf says, "involves wearing my coronation robes?"  
  
She winces. “Ah. I thought that I recognized them.”  
  
"I see I have been too merciful," Ganondorf continues, contemplative. "I will have to chasten those girls." He steps into the room, toward the princess’s bed, and lifts the coverlet. A scarf, diaphanous, pale as the dawn, drifts to the floor. "Come." He opens the coverlet and holds it before him, so that he can only see the princess from the neck up. "Cover yourself."  
  
She steps out of the robes, into the coverlet. He folds the coverlet around her, hears the whisper of it over the flagstones as it—and he—encloses her.  
  
"Thank you," she says. Her voice is soft in the dim-lit room.  
  
He nods, steps back, then goes to gather up his robes. She watches him.  
  
"You will not be too harsh with them?" she asks.  
  
"They have asked for chastening," he says. He glances sideways at her. "But I will not be too harsh with them. If that is what you wish."  
  
She smiles. “I do.”  
  
oOo  
  
She leaves upon the morning of the seventh day. Several of the younger cousins weep, wail, and gnash their teeth, as if they are being robbed of a favored pet.  
  
"Make her stay!" the tiniest cousin sobs.  
  
"Stop your wailing," Ganondorf retorts, though he wishes the same.  
  
Ganondorf finds the princess waiting in the courtyard, still standing though her entire escort is ahorse. She offers him her hands. Her skin is cool. She smells of rosewater, sweet oil.  
  
"It has been a pleasure, King Ganondorf Dragmire," she says.  
  
"And mine, Princess Zelda Nohansen."  
  
She does not immediately release him. She reaches with one hand into her pocket and draws forth a dawn pink scarf. He recognizes it as the one that fell from her bed.  
  
"I must apologize," she says, "for any damage I wrecked upon your robes."  
  
"There was no damage."  
  
"Still." She leans forward, as if they are co-conspirators. "A garment for a garment, yes?"  
  
She slips her other hand free of his, then wraps the scarf with deft movements around his upper arm. The silk smells faintly of her skin.  
  
"Will you accept it?" If such is possible, her voice is even lower.  
  
He looks between the scarf and her eyes, so pale a blue that they are almost colorless. “If you wish it,” he says.  
  
She presses his hand for a final time. “I do.”  
  
Though later he thinks, he would have accepted it, whatever she had said.


End file.
